CSS Commander

By Richard Lubomski Tuesday October 28, 2008

After reading a great article on alistapart titled ‘Progressive Enhancement with CSS, I’ve been amazed at the ease of using this technique when building sites. Progressive Enhancement is designed to focus on the content, NOT the design (see the Peanut analogy!), and is a difficult subject to grasp, but once mastered, can open a plethora of benefits…

The core strategy uses multiple stylesheets to differentiate between design and content:

Type.css
Layout.css
Screen.css
Print.css
color.css

And because IE is the work of the devil, Conditional formatting stylesheets are introduced to deal with the daftness that is the IE Rendering engine:

ie6.css
ie7.css

This gives you a solid platform which to build an extensible site which will also degrade gracefully. I urge you to read the article as it gives many examples of why this is so useful,

Many thanks to Aaron Gustafson for making this digestable!